Election reporting for the rest of the year

Billy Hollis at Q and O fills us in on the election reporting we will get for the rest of the year.  Straight from his "patented combination of cracked crystal ball, Ouija board, and leaky 8-ball. It includes short summaries of legacy media narratives at various points from roughly a month ago up until past the election."

"overpaid, egotistical blowhards"

Mead:

Concern about the climate, we continue to believe at Via Meadia, is not misplaced, but the crazy set of unrealistic objectives, laughable foreign aid boondoggles, Malthusian panic mongering and cockamamie treaty plans made this UN process a clown circus that was doomed to fail — and the sooner, the better.  There was a time — as recently as early 2010 — when the Great and the Good, the Champions of the Conventional Wisdom and the Oracles of the Davoisie identified this forlorn negotiation as the wave of the future and the last best hope of man.

Let the futility and failure to which all this led be a reminder to us and to them: those who guide the world’s destiny aren’t nearly as discerning as they think they are. Between the American housing bubble, the European meltdown and the climate disaster, it almost begins to look as if the Establishment consists mostly of overpaid, egotistical blowhards.

No 'almost' about it.

Heh.

Glenn Reynolds:

REMEMBER WHEN PROTEST WAS PATRIOTIC? AND WHEN IT WAS WRONG TO QUESTION PEOPLE’S PATRIOTISM? Van Jones:Tea Party out to destroy America.

For the record, let me say that I entertain no doubts whatsoever about the extent of Van Jones’ patriotism.

Grade Inflation

Liberals run America's colleges and universities.  Like everything else controlled and dominated by liberals (schools, government, unions, mainline protestant churches, et al), they've screwed up the grading system so much it has become meaningless.  'A' is the most common grade in college today.  In economics, bad money drives out good. Inflation devalues everything of merit.

On Liberty and Leadership -- our shortage of chains

“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.” --Thomas Jefferson

We seem to have a shortage of chains.

“Are you serious? Are you serious?" -- Nancy Pelosi when asked where specifically did the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?

Pelosi -- “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

Issues which energize the GOP base and appeal to the middle

I love Via Meadia, but in a post about Romney and his opportunity to use the issue of education to his advantage, this line is just wrong:

  For Romney, this is a rare issue that both energizes the conservative base of the Republican Party and reaches out toward the center ground in an inclusive way...

Talk about ridiculous.  There are a large number of important issues, most of them in this election, which energize the GOP base and appeal to a majority of voters (which obviously includes the center).  My comment:

How clueless is this line?

Tax cuts, reducing government bureaucracy and spending, repealing Obamacare, upholding religious freedom, defeating cap and trade and other global warming boondoggles — the list of issues which energize the GOP base and appeal to a majority of US voters just goes on and on.

Rare? ‘Rare’ is a way to describe reporters who asked about Obama’s past, people who remember him from college, his girlfriends, Barack’s efforts to reach out to the GOP or Congress, or the times he’s opted out of a vacation or round of golf.

More evidence the Euro is toast

Via Meadia explains that Spain is even worse than they thought:

The problem is Spain, which dropped two stink bombs on the world. First, the cost of bailing out just one of Spain’s many doomstriken banks shot up from €4.5 billion ($5.6 billion) to €23.5 billion ($29.5 billion). This is money that Spain’s cash strapped government doesn’t really have; it is under orders from Brussels to reduce its budget deficits and has already slashed spending even as youth unemployment hits a Detroit-level 50 percent. This news isn’t just bad in itself; it means that the other zombie banks in Spain (and there are plenty of them) are going to be much, much more expensive to rescue than previously believed.
The other piece of bad news is potentially even worse. This came in the form of a statement of the president of Catalonia that his regional government is running out of money and needs a bail out of its own. Catalonia, a region in northeastern Spain which speaks its own language and hosts an independence movement, is as the FT notes bigger than Portugal in terms of GDP and accounts for one fifth of Spain’s economic activity.

Spain and Italy and others are not different from Greece.  Margaret Thatcher's truth still holds -- "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."

What is beginning to look likely in Spain — that the financial meltdown of the country is imposing burdens that the political system cannot sustain — could also be true of Europe as a whole. Europe’s policy makers think they see a path — difficult, but possible — on which Europe could tiptoe past a Greek meltdown and still hold together. It has always been much more difficult to imagine a way to handle a meltdown of Spain with its much bigger economy and its greater population.
The greatest hope for a non-catastrophic outcome to the European crisis has for some time been that Greece really was sui generis and that the other Club Med members could somehow limp into port even as Greece sank. The recent news from Spain suggests that it, too, may be holed below the water line.